CHAPTER XXXI
THE EMPIRE AT ITS HEIGHT
Napoleon's star had now risen to its zenith. After his marriage with a daughter of the most ancient of continental dynasties, nothing seemed lacking to his splendour. He had humbled Pope and Emperor alike: Germany crouched at his feet: France, Italy, and the Confederation of the Rhine gratefully acknowledged the benefits of his vigorous sway: the Czar was still following the lead given at Erfurt: Sweden had succumbed to the pressure of the two Emperors: and Turkey survived only because it did not yet suit Napoleon to shear her asunder: he must first complete the commercial ruin of England and drive Wellington into the sea. Then events would at last be ripe for the oriental schemes which the Spanish Rising had postponed.
He might well hope that England's strength was running out: near the close of 1810 the three per cent. consols sank to sixty-five, and the declared bankruptcies averaged 250 a month. The failure of the Walcheren expedition had led to terrible loss of men and treasure, and had clouded over the reputation of her leaders. After mutual recriminations Canning and Castlereagh resigned office and fought a duel. Shortly afterwards the Premier, the Duke of Portland, fell ill and resigned: his place was taken by Mr. Perceval, a man whose sole recommendation for the post was his conscientious Toryism and powers of dull plodding. Ruled by an ill-assorted Ministry and a King whose reason was now hopelessly overclouded, weakened by the strangling grip of the Continental System, England seemed on the[pg.209] verge of ruin; and, encouraged alike by the factious conduct of our parliamentary Opposition and by Soult's recent conquest of Andalusia, Napoleon bent himself to the final grapple by extending his coast system, and by sending Masséna and his choicest troops into Spain to drive the leopards into the sea.
The limits of our space prevent any description of the ensuing campaign of Torres Vedras; and we must refer our readers to the ample canvas of Napier if they would realize the sagacity of Wellington in constructing to the north of Lisbon that mighty tête de pont for the Sea Power against Masséna's veteran army. After dealing the staggering blow of Busaco at that presumptuous Marshal, our great leader fell back, through a tract which he swept bare of supplies, on this sure bulwark, and there watched the French host of some 65,000 men waste away amidst the miseries of hunger and the rains and diseases of autumn. At length, in November, Masséna drew off to positions near Santarem, where he awaited the succour which Napoleon ordered Soult to bring. It was in vain: Soult, puffed up by his triumphs in Andalusia, was resolved to play his own game and reduce Badajoz; he won his point but marred the campaign; and, at last, foiled by Wellington's skilful tactics, Masséna beat a retreat northwards out of Portugal after losing some 35,000 men (March, 1811). Wellington's success bore an immeasurable harvest of results. The unmanly whinings of the English Opposition were stilled; the replies of the Czar to Napoleon's demands grew firmer; and the patriots of the Peninsula stiffened their backs in a resistance so stubborn, albeit unskilful, that 370,000 French troops utterly failed to keep Wellington in check, and to stamp out the national defence in the summer of 1811.
In truth, Napoleon had exasperated the Spaniards no less than their soi disant king, by a series of provocations extending over the year 1810. On the plea that Spain must herself meet the expenses of the war, he erected the four northern provinces into commands for[pg.210] French generals, who were independent of his brother's authority and levied all the taxes over that vast area (February). On May 29th he withdrew Burgos and Valladolid from Joseph's control, and divided the greater part of Spain for military and administrative purposes into districts that were French satrapies in all but name. The decree was doubly disastrous: it gave free play to the feuds of the French chiefs; and it seemed to the Spaniards to foreshadow a speedy partition of Spain. The surmise was correct. Napoleon intended to unite to France the lands between the Pyrenees and the Ebro. Indeed, in his conception, the conquest of Portugal was mainly desirable because it would provide his brother with an indemnity in the west for the loss of his northern provinces. Joseph's protests against such a partition of the land, which Napoleon had sworn at Bayonne to keep intact, were disregarded; but letters on this subject fell into the hands of the Spanish guerillas and were published by order of the Regency at Cadiz. Despised by the Spaniards, flouted by Napoleon, set at defiance by the French satraps, and reduced wellnigh to bankruptcy, the puppet King felt his position insupportable, and, hurrying to Paris, tendered his resignation of the crown (May, 1811). In his anxiety to huddle up the scandal, Napoleon appeased his brother, promised him one-fourth of the taxes levied by the French commanders, and coaxed or drove him to resume his thankless task at Madrid. But the doggedness of the Emperor's resolve may be measured by the fact that, even when on the brink of war with Russia, he defied Spanish national sentiment by annexing Catalonia to France (March, 1812).
It seems strange that Napoleon did not himself proceed to Spain in order to direct the operations in person and thus still the jealousies of the Marshals which so hampered his armies. Wellington certainly feared his coming. At a later date he told Earl Stanhope that Napoleon was vastly superior to any of his Marshals: "There was nothing like him. He suited a French army[pg.211] so exactly.... His presence on the field made a difference of 40,000 men."[[224]] That estimate is certainly modest if one looks not merely at tactics but at the strategy of the whole Peninsular War. But the Emperor did not again come into Spain. At the outset of 1810 he prepared to do so; but, as soon as the Austrian marriage was arranged, he abandoned this salutary project.
There were thenceforth several reasons why he should remain in or near Paris. His attentions to his young wife, and his desire to increase the splendour of the Court, counted for much. Yet more important was it to curb the clericals (now incensed at the imprisonment of the Pope), and sharply to watch the intrigues of the royalists and other malcontents. Public opinion, also, still needed to be educated; the constant drain of men for the wars and the increase in the price of necessaries led to grumblings in the Press, which claimed the presence of his Argus eye and the adoption of a very stringent censorship.[[225]] But, above all, there was the commercial war with England. This could be directed best from Paris, where he could speedily hear of British endeavours to force goods into Germany, Holland, or Italy, and of any change in our maritime code.
Important as was the war in Spain, it was only one phase of his world-wide struggle with the mistress of the seas; and he judged that if she bled to death under his Continental System, the Peninsular War must subside into a guerilla strife, Spain thereafter figuring merely as a greater Vendée. Accordingly, the year 1810 sees the climax of his great commercial experiment.
The first land to be sacrificed to this venture was[pg.212] Holland. For many months the Emperor had been discontented with his brother Louis, who had taken into his head the strange notion that he reigned there by divine right. As Napoleon pathetically said at St. Helena, when reviewing the conduct of his brothers, "If I made one a king, he imagined that he was King by the grace of God. He was no longer my lieutenant: he was one enemy more for me to watch." A singular fate for this king-maker, that he should be forgotten and the holy oil alone remembered! Yet Louis probably used that mediæval notion as a shield against his brother's dictation. The tough Bonaparte nature brooked not the idea of mere lieutenancy. He declined to obey orders from the brother whom he secretly detested. He flatly refused to be transferred from the Hague to Madrid, or to put in force the burdensome decrees of the Continental System.
On his side, Napoleon upbraided him with governing too softly, and with seeking popularity where he should seek control. After the Walcheren expedition, he chid him severely for allowing the English fleet ever to show its face in the Scheldt; for "the fleets of that Power ought to find nothing but rocks of iron" in that river, "which was as important to France as the Thames to England."[[226]] But the head and front of his offending was that British goods still found their way into Holland. In vain did the Emperor forbid that American ships which had touched at English ports should be debarred from those of Holland. In vain did he threaten to close the Scheldt and Rhine to Dutch barges. Louis held on his way, with kindly patience towards his merchants, and with a Bonapartist obstinacy proof against fraternal advice or threats. At last, early in 1810, Napoleon sent troops to occupy Walcheren and neighbouring Dutch lands. It seemed for a time as though this was but a device to extort favourable terms of peace from England in return for an offer that France would not annex Holland. Negotiations to this effect were set on foot through[pg.213] the medium of Ouvrard and Labouchere, son-in-law of the banker Baring: Fouché also, without the knowledge of his master, ventured to put forth a diplomatic feeler as to a possible Anglo-French alliance against the United States, an action for which he was soon very properly disgraced.[[227]]
The negotiation failed, as it deserved to do. Our objections were, not merely to the absurd proposal that we should give up our maritime code if Napoleon would abstain from annexing Holland and the Hanseatic towns, but still more against the man himself and his whole policy. We had every reason to distrust the good faith of the man who had betrayed the Turks at Tilsit, Portugal at Fontainebleau, and the Spaniards at Bayonne. To pause in the strife, to relax our hold on our new colonies, and to desert the Spaniards, in order to preserve the merely titular independence of Holland and the Hanse Towns, would have been an act of singular simplicity. Nor does Napoleon seem to have expected it. He wrote to his Foreign Minister, Champagny, on March 20th, 1810: "From not having made peace sooner, England has lost Naples, Spain, Portugal, and the market of Trieste. If she delays much longer, she will lose Holland, the Hanse Towns, and Sicily." And surely this Sibylline conduct of his required that he should annex these lands and all Europe in order to exact a suitable price from the exhausted islanders. Such was the corollary of the Continental System.
Meanwhile Louis, nettled by the inquisitions of the French douaniers, and by the order of his brother to seize all American ships in Dutch ports, was drawing on himself further reproaches and threats: "Louis, you are incorrigible ... you do not want to reign for any length of time. States are governed by reason and policy, and not by acrimony and weakness." Twenty thousand French troops were approaching Amsterdam to bring him to[pg.214] reason, when the young ruler decided to be rid of this royal mummery. On the night of July 1st he fled from Haarlem, and travelled swiftly and secretly eastwards until he reached Teplitz, in Bohemia. The ignominy of this flight rested on the brother who had made kingship a mockery. The refugee left behind him the reputation of a man who, lovable by nature but soured by domestic discords, sought to shield his subjects from the ruin into which the rigid application of the Continental System was certain to plunge them. That fate now befell the unhappy little land. On July 9th it was annexed to the French Empire, and all the commercial decrees were carried out as rigidly at Rotterdam as at Havre.
At the close of the year, Napoleon's coast system was extended to the borders of Holstein by the annexation of Oldenburg, the northern parts of Berg, Westphalia, and Hanover, along with Lauenburg and the Hanse Towns, Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck. The little Swiss Republic of Valais was also absorbed in the Empire.
This change in North Germany, which carried the French flag to the shores of the Baltic, was his final expedient for assuring England's commercial ruin. As far back as February, 1798, he had recommended the extension of French influence over the Hanse Towns as a means of reducing his most redoubtable foe to surrender, and now there were two special reasons for this annexation. First, the ships of Oldenburg had been largely used for conveying British produce into North Germany; [[228]] and secondly, the French commercial code was so rigorous that no officials with even the semblance of independence could be trusted with its execution. On August 5th a decree had been promulgated at the Trianon, near Versailles, which imposed enormous duties on every important colonial product. Cotton—especially that from America—sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, and other articles were subjected to dues, generally of half their value and irrespective of their place of production. [pg.215]
CENTRAL EUROPE AFTER 1810
Traders were ordered to declare their possession of all colonial wares and to pay the duty, under pain of confiscation. Depôts of such goods within four days' distance from the frontiers of the Empire were held to be clandestine; and troops were sent forthwith into Germany, Switzerland, and Spain to seize such stores, a proceeding which aroused the men of Stuttgart, [pg.216] Frankfurt, and Berne to almost open resistance. It is difficult to see the reason for this decree, except on the supposition that the Continental System did not stop British imports, and that all tropical products were British.
Napoleon's own correspondence shows that he believed this to be so. At that same time he issued orders that all colonial produce found at Stettin should be confiscated because it was evidently English property brought on American ships. He further recommended Murat and Eugène to press hard on such wares in order to replenish their exchequers and raise funds for restoring their commerce. Eugène must, however, be careful to tax American and colonial cotton most heavily, while letting in that of the Levant on favourable terms.
Jerome, too, was bidden rigorously to enforce the Trianon tariff in Westphalia; and the hint was to be passed on to Prussia and the Rhenish Confederation that, by subjecting colonial goods to these enormous imposts, those States would gain several millions of francs "and the loss would fall partly on English commerce and partly on the smugglers."[[229]] In fact, all his acts and words at this time reveal the densest ignorance, not only of political economy, but of the elementary facts of commerce, as when he imagined that officials, who were sufficiently hard worked with watching a nimble host of some 100,000 smugglers along an immense frontier, would also be able to distinguish between Syrian and American cottons, and to exact 800 francs from 100 kilogrammes of the latter, as against 400 francs from the former, or that six times as much could ever be levied on Chinese teas as on other teas! Such a tariff called for a highly drilled army of those sufficiently rare individuals, honest douaniers, endowed also with Napoleonic activity and omniscience. But, as Chaptal[pg.217] remarked, the Emperor had never thought much about the needs of commerce, and he despised merchants as persons who had "neither a faith nor a country, whose sole object was gain." His own notion about commerce was that he could "make it manoeuvre like a regiment"; and this military conception of trade led him to entertain the fond hope that exchequers benefited by confiscation and prohibitive tariffs, that a "national commerce" could be speedily built up by cutting off imports, and that the burden of loss in the present commercial war fell on England and not on the continental consumer.
Such was the penalty which the great man paid for scorning all new knowledge as idéalogie. The principles set forth by Quesnay, Turgot, and Adam Smith were to him mere sophistical juggling. He once said to Mollien: "I seek the good that is practical, not the ideal best: the world is very old: we must profit by its experience: it teaches that old practices are worth more than new theories: you are not the only one who knows trade secrets."[[230]] This was his general attitude towards the exponents of new financial or commercial views. Indeed, we can hardly think of this great champion of external control and state intervention favouring the open-handed methods of laisser faire. Unhappy France, that gave this motto to the world but let her greatest ruler emphasize her recent reaction towards commercial mediævalism! Luckless Emperor, who aspired to found the United States of Europe, but outraged the principle which most surely and lastingly works for international harmony, that of Free Trade!
While the Trianon tariff sought to hinder the import of England's colonial products, or, failing that, to reap a golden harvest from them, Napoleon further endeavoured to terrify continental dealers from accepting any of her manufactures. His Fontainebleau decree of October 18th, 1810, ordered that all such goods should be seized and publicly burnt; and five weeks later special tribunals were instituted for enforcing these ukases and for trying[pg.218] all persons, whether smugglers caught red-handed or shopkeepers who inadvertently offered for sale the cottons of Lancashire or the silks of Bengal.
The canon was now complete. It only remained to convert the world to the new gospel of pacific war. The results were soon clearly visible in a sudden rise of prices throughout France, Germany, and Italy. Raw cotton now fetched 10 to 11 francs, sugar 6 to 7 francs, coffee 8 francs, and indigo 21 francs, per pound, or on the average about ten times the prices then ruling at London.[[231]] The reason for this advantage to the English consumer and manufacturer is clear. England swayed the tropics and held the seas; and, having a monopoly of colonial produce, she could import it easily and abundantly, while the continental purchaser had ultimately to pay for the risks incurred by his shopkeeper, by British merchants, and by their smugglers, who "ran in" from Heligoland, Jersey, or Sicily. These classes vied in their efforts to prick holes in the continental decrees. Bargees and women, dogs and hearses, were pressed into service against Napoleon. The last-named device was for a time tried with much success near Hamburg, until the French authorities, wondering at the strange increase of funerals in a river-side suburb, peered into the hearses, and found them stuffed full with bales of British merchandise. This gruesome plan failing, others were tried. Large quantities of sand were brought from the seashore, until, unfortunately for the housewives, some inquisitive official found that it hailed from the West Indies.
Or again, devious routes were resorted to. Sugar was smuggled from London into Germany by way of Salonica, that being now almost the only neutral port open to British commerce. Thence it was borne in panniers on the backs of mules over the Balkans to Belgrade, where it was transferred to barges and carried up the Danube. Another illicit trade route was from the desolate shores of Dalmatia through Hungary. The writer of a [pg.219] pamphlet, "England, Ireland, and America," states that his firm then employed 500 horses on and near that coast in carrying British goods into Central Europe, and that the cost of getting them into France was "about £28 per cwt., or more than fifty times the present freight to Calcutta." In fact, the result of the Emperor's economic experiments may be summed up in the statement of Chaptal that the general run of prices in France was higher by one-third than it was before 1789.
Now the merest tyro might see that the difference in price above the normal level was paid by the consumer. The colonial producer, the British merchant and shipper were certainly harassed, and trade was dislocated; but, as Mollien observed, commerce soon adapted itself to altered conditions; and merchants never parted with their wares without getting hard cash or resorting to the primitive method of barter. Money was also frequently melted down in France and Germany so as to effect bargains with England in bars of metal. And so, in one way or another, trade was carried on, with infinite discomfort and friction, it is true; but it never wholly ceased even between England and France direct.
In fact, Napoleon so clung to the old mercantilist craze of stimulating exports in order that they might greatly exceed the imports, as to favour the sending of agricultural produce to England, provided that such cargoes comprised manufactured goods. He allowed this privilege not only to his Empire but also to the Kingdom of Italy.[[232]] The difficulty was that England would not receive the manufactured goods of her enemies; and, as corn and cheese could not be exported to England, unless a certain proportion of silk and cloths went with them, the latter were got up so as to satisfy the French customs officers and then cast into the sea. It is needless to add that this export of manufactures to England, on which Napoleon prided himself, was limited to showy but worthless articles, which were made solely ad usum delphinorum.[pg.220]
It was fortunate for us that Napoleon entertained these crude ideas on political economy; for his action opened for us a loophole of escape from a very serious difficulty. At that time our fast growing population was barely fed by our own wheat even after good seasons; and Providence afflicted us in 1809 and 1810 with very poor harvests. In 1810 the average price was 103 shillings the quarter, the highest ever known except in 1800 and 1801; and as commerce was dislocated by the Continental System and hand-labour was being largely replaced by the new power-looms and improved spinning machinery, the outlook would have been hopeless, had not our great enemy allowed us to import continental corn. This device, which he imagined would impoverish us to enrich his own States, was the greatest aid that he could have rendered to our hard-pressed social system; and readers of Charlotte Brontë's realistic sketches of the Luddite rioting in Yorkshire may imagine what would have befallen England if, besides lack of work and low wages, there had been the added horrors of a bread famine. But fortunately the curious commercial notions harboured by our foe enabled us in the winter of 1810-11 to get supplies of corn not only from Prussia and Poland but even from Italy and France.
In one sense this incident has been misunderstood. It has been referred to by Porter[[233]] and other hopeful persons as proof positive that as long as we can buy corn we shall get it, even from our enemies. It proves nothing of the sort. Napoleon's correspondence and his whole policy with regard to licences, which we shall presently examine, shows clearly that he believed he would greatly benefit his own States and impoverish our people by selling us large stores of corn at a very high price. There is no hint in any of his letters that he ever framed the notion of starving us into surrender. All that he looked to was the draining away of our wealth by cutting off our exports, and by allowing imports to enter our harbours much as usual. As long as he prevented us selling[pg.221] our produce, he heeded little how much we bought from his States: in fact, the more we bought, the sooner we should be bankrupt—such was his notion.
It is strange that he never sought to cut off our corn-supplies. They were then drawn almost entirely from the Baltic ports. The United States and Canada had as yet only sent us a few driblets of corn. La Plata and the Cape of Good Hope were quite undeveloped; and our settlements in New South Wales were at that time often troubled by dearth. The plan of sealing up the cornfields of Europe from Riga to Trieste would have been feasible, at least for a few weeks; French troops held Danzig and Stettin; Russia, Prussia, and Denmark were at his beck and call; and an imperial decree forbidding the export of corn from France and her allied States to the United Kingdom could hardly have failed to reduce us to starvation and surrender in the very critical winter of 1810-11. But that strange mental defect of clinging with ever increasing tenacity to preconceived notions led Napoleon to allow and even to favour exports of corn to us in the time of our utmost need; and Britain survived the strain.[[234]]
What folly, however, to refer to the action of this man of one economic idea as being likely to determine the conduct of continental statesmen in some future naval war with England. In truth, the urgency of the problem of our national food-supply in time of a great war can only be fully understood by those who have studied the Napoleonic era. England then grew nearly enough corn for her needs; her fleets swept the seas; and Napoleon's economic hobby left her foreign food-supply unhampered at the severest crisis. Yet, even so, the price of the quartern loaf rose to more than fifteenpence, and we[pg.222] were brought to the verge of civil war. A comparison of that time with the conditions that now prevail must yield food for reflection to all but the case-hardened optimists.
But already Napoleon was convinced that the Continental System must be secretly relaxed in special cases. Despite the fulsome addresses which some Chambers of Commerce sent up, he knew that his seaports were in the depths of distress, and that French cotton manufacturers could not hope to compete with those of Lancashire now that his own tariff had doubled the price of raw cotton and dyes in France. He therefore hit upon the curious device of allowing continental merchants to buy licences for the privilege of secretly evading his own decrees. The English Government seems to have been the first to issue similar secret permits; but Napoleon had scarcely signed his Berlin Decree for the blockade of England before he connived at its infraction. When sugar, coffee, and other comforts became scarce, they were secretly imported from perfidious Albion for the imperial table. The final stage was reached in July, 1810, when licences to import forbidden goods were secretly sold to favoured merchants, and many officials—among them Bourrienne—reaped a rich harvest from the sale of these imperial indulgences. Merchants were so eager to evade the hated laws that they offered high prices to the treasury and douceurs to officials for the coveted boon; and as much as £40,000 is said to have been paid for a single licence.
On both sides of the Channel this device was abhorred, but its results were specially odious in Napoleon's States, where the burdens to be evaded were far heavier than those entailed by the Orders in Council. In fact, the Continental System was now seen to be an organized hypocrisy, which, in order to ruin the mistress of the seas, exposed the peoples to burdens more grievous than those borne by England, and left all but the wealthiest merchants a prey to a grinding fiscal tyranny. And the sting of it all was its social injustice; for while the poor[pg.223] were severely punished, sometimes with death, for smuggling sugar or tobacco, Napoleon and the favoured few who could buy licences often imported these articles in large quantities. What wonder, then, that Russia and Sweden should decline long to endure these gratuitous hardships, and should seek to evade the behests of the imperial smuggler of the Tuileries!
Nevertheless, as no inventive people can ever be thrown wholly on its own resources without deriving some benefit, we find that France met the crisis with the cheery patience and unflagging ingenuity which she has ever evinced. In a great Empire which embraced all the lands between Hamburg, Bayonne, and Rome, not to mention Illyria and Dalmatia, a great variety of products might readily reward the inventor and the husbandman. Tobacco, rice, and cotton could be reared in the southern portions. Valiant efforts were also made to get Asiatic produce overland, so as to disappoint the English cruisers; and the coffee of Arabia was taxed very lightly, so as to ruin the American producer. When the fragrant berry became more and more scarce, chicory was discovered by good patriots to be a palatable substitute, and scientific men sought to induce French manufacturers to use the isatis plant instead of indigo. Prizes were offered by the State and by local Chambers of Commerce to those who should make up for the lack of tropical goods and dyes.
A notable discovery was made by Chaptal and Delessert, who improved on Markgraf's process of procuring sugar from beetroot and made it a practical success. Napoleon also hoped that a chemical substitute for indigo had been found, and exclaimed to a doleful deputation of merchants, who came to the Tuileries in the early summer of 1811, that chemistry would soon revolutionize commerce as completely as the discovery of the compass had done. Besides, the French Empire was the richest country in the world, and could almost do without foreign commerce, at least until England had given way; and that would soon come to pass; for the pressure of events would soon[pg.224] compel London merchants to throw their sugar and indigo into the Thames.[[235]]
In reality, he placed commerce far behind agriculture, which he considered to be the basis of a nation's wealth and a nation's health. But he also took a keen interest in manufactures. The silk industry at Lyons found in him a generous patron. He ordered that the best scientific training should there be given, so as to improve the processes of manufacture; and, as silk of nearly all kinds could be produced in France and Italy, Lyons was comparatively prosperous. When, however, it suffered from the general rise of prices and from the impaired buying power of the community, he adopted heroic remedies. He ordered that all ships leaving France should carry silk fabrics equal in value to one-fourth of the whole freight; but whether these stuffs went to adorn women or mermaids seems an open question. Or again, on the advice of Chaptal, the Emperor made large purchases of surplus stocks of Lyons silk, Rouen cottons, and Ste. Antoine furniture, so as to prevent an imminent collapse of credit and a recrudescence of Jacobinism in those industrial centres; for as he said: "I fear a rising brought about by want of bread: I had rather fight an army of 200,000 men than that."[[236]]
In the main, this policy of giving panem et circenses was successful in France; at least, it kept her quiet. The national feeling ran strongly in favour of commercial prohibition. In 1787 Arthur Young found the cotton-workers of the north furious at the recent inroads of Lancashire cottons, while the wine-growers of the Garonne were equally favourable to the enlightened Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786. It was Napoleon's lot to win the favour of the rigid[pg.225] protectionists, while not alienating that of the men of the Gironde, who saw in him the champion of agrarian liberty against the feudal nobles. Moreover, the nation still cherished the pathetic belief that the war was due to Albion's perfidy respecting Malta, and burned with a desire to chastise the recreant islanders. For these reasons, Frenchmen endured the drain of men and money with but little show of grumbling.
They were tired of the wars. We have had enough glory, they said, even in the capital itself, and an acute German observer describes the feeling there as curiously mixed. Parisian gaiety often found vent in lampoons against the Emperor; and much satire at his expense might with safety be indulged in among a crowd, provided it were seasoned with wit. The people seemed not to fear Napoleon, as he was feared in Germany: the old revolutionary party was still active and might easily become far more dangerous than the royalist coteries of the Boulevard St. Germain. For the rest, they were all so accustomed to political change that they looked on his government as provisional, and put up with him only as long as the army triumphed abroad and he could make his power felt at home. Such was the impression of Paris gained by Varnhagen von Ense. Public opinion in the provinces seems to have been more favourable to Napoleon; and, on the whole, pride in the army and in the vigorous administration which that nation loves, above all, hatred of England and the hope of wresting from her the world's empire, led the French silently to endure rigorous press laws, increased taxes, war prices, licences, and chicory.
For Germans the hardships were much greater and the alleviations far less. They had no deep interest in Malta or in the dominion of the seas; and political economy was then only beginning to dawn on the Teutonic mind. The general trend of German thought had inclined towards the Everlasting Nay, until Napoleon flashed across its ken. For a time he won the admiration of the chief thinkers of Germany by brushing away the feudal[pg.226] cobwebs from her fair face. He seemed about to call her sons to a life of public activity; and in the famous soliloquy of Faust, in which he feels his way from word to thought, from thought to might, and from might to action, we may discern the literary projection of the influence exerted by the new Charlemagne on that nation of dreamers.[[237]] But the promise was fulfilled only in the most harshly practical way, namely, by cutting off all supplies of tobacco and coffee; and when Teufelsdröckh himself, admirer though he was of the French Revolution, found that the summons for his favourite beverage—the "dear melancholy coffee, that begets fancies," of Lessing—produced only a muddy decoction of acorns, there was the risk of his tendencies earthwards taking a very practically revolutionary turn.
In truth, the German universities were the leaders of the national reaction against the Emperor of the West. Fichte's pleading for a truly national education had taken effect. Elementary instruction was now being organized in Prussia; and the divorce of thought from action, which had so long sterilized German life, was ended by the foundation of the University of Berlin by Humboldt. Thus, in 1810, the year of Prussia's deepest woe, when her brave Queen died of a stricken heart, when French soldiers and douaniers were seizing and burning colonial wares, her thinkers came into closer touch with her men of action, with mutually helpful results. Thinkers ceased to be mere dreamers, and Prussian officials gained a wider outlook on life. The life of beneficent activity, to which Napoleon might have summoned the great majority of Germans, dawned on them from Berlin, not from Paris.
His influence was more and more oppressive. The final results of his commercial decrees on the trade of Hamburg were thus described by Perthes, a well-known writer and bookseller of that town: "Of the 422 sugar-boiling houses, few now stood open: the printing of cottons had ceased entirely: the tobacco-dressers were[pg.227] driven away by the Government. The imposition of innumerable taxes, door and window, capitation and land taxes, drove the inhabitants to despair." But the same sagacious thinker was able to point the moral of it all, and prove to his friends that their present trials were due to the selfish particularism of the German States: "It was a necessity that some great power should arise in the midst of the degenerate selfishness of the times and also prove victorious, for there was nothing vigorous to oppose it. Napoleon is an historical necessity."[[238]]
Thus, both in the abodes of learning and in the centres of industry men were groping after a higher unity and a firmer political organization, which, after the Napoleonic deluge had swept by, was to lay the foundation of a New Germany.
To all appearances, however, Napoleon's power seemed to be more firmly established than ever in the ensuing year. On March 20th, 1811, a son was born to him. At the crisis of this event, he revealed the warmth of his family instincts. On hearing that the life of mother or infant might have to be sacrificed, he exclaimed at once, "Save the mother."[[239]] When the danger was past, he very considerately informed Josephine, stating, "he has my chest, my mouth and my eyes. I trust that he will fulfil his destiny." That destiny was mapped out in the title conferred on the child, "King of Rome," which was designed to recall the title "King of the Romans," used in the Holy Roman Empire.
Napoleon resolved that the old elective dignity should now be renewed in a strictly hereditary Empire, vaster than that of Charlemagne. Paris was to be its capital, Rome its second city, and the future Emperors were always to be crowned a second time at Rome. Furthermore, lest the mediæval dispute as to the supremacy of Emperor or Pope in Rome should again vex mankind, the Papacy was virtually annexed: the status of the pontiff was defined in the most Erastian sense, imperial funds were[pg.228] assigned for his support, and he was bidden to maintain two palaces, "the one necessarily at Paris, the other at Rome."
It is impossible briefly to describe the various conflicts between Pius VII. and Napoleon. Though now kept in captivity by Napoleon, the Pope refused to ratify these and other ukases of his captor; and the credit which Napoleon had won by his wordly-wise Concordat was now lost by his infraction of many of its clauses and by his harsh treatment of a defenceless old man. It is true that Pius had excommunicated Napoleon; but that was for the crime of annexing the Papal States, and public opinion revolted at the spectacle of an all-powerful Emperor now consigning to captivity the man who in former years had done so much to consolidate his authority. After the disasters of the Russian campaign, he sought to come to terms with the pontiff; but even then the bargain struck at Fontainebleau was so hard that his prisoner, though unnerved by ill-health, retracted the unholy compromise. Whereupon Napoleon ordered that the cardinals who advised this step should be seized and carried away from Fontainebleau. Few of Napoleon's actions were more harmful than this series of petty persecutions; and among the influences that brought about his fall, we may reckon the dignified resistance of the pontiff, whose meekness threw up in sharp relief the pride and arrogance of his captor. The Papacy stooped, but only to conquer.
For the present, everything seemed to favour the new Charlemagne. Never had the world seen embodied might like that of Napoleon's Empire; and well might he exclaim at the birth of the King of Rome, "Now begins the finest epoch of my reign." All the auguries seemed favourable. In France, the voice of opposition was all but hushed. Italians, Swiss, and even some Spaniards, helped to keep down Prussia. Dutchmen and Danes had hunted down Schill for him at Stralsund. Polish horsemen had charged up the Somosierra Pass against the Spanish guns, and did valiant service on the[pg.229] bloody field of Albuera. The Confederation of the Rhine could send forth 150,000 men to fight his battles. The Hapsburgs were his vassals, and only faint shadows of discord as yet clouded his relations with Alexander. One of his Marshals, Bernadotte, had been chosen to succeed to the crown of Sweden; and at the other end of Europe, it seemed that Wellington and the Spanish patriots must ultimately succumb to superior numbers.
Surely now was the time for the fulfilment of those glowing oriental designs beside which his European triumphs seemed pale. In the autumn of 1810 he sent agents carefully to inspect the strongholds of Egypt and Syria, and his consuls in the Levant were ordered to send a report every six months on the condition of the Turkish Empire.[[240]] Above all, he urged on the completion of dockyards and ships of war. Vast works were pushed on at Antwerp and Cherbourg: ships and gunboats were to be built at every suitable port from the Texel to Naples and Trieste; and as the result of these labours, the Emperor counted on having 104 ships of the line, which would cover the transports from the Mediterranean, Cherbourg, Boulogne and the Scheldt, and threaten England with an array of 200,000 fighting men.[[241]]
In March, 1811, this plan was modified, possibly because, as in 1804, he found the difficulties of a descent on our coasts greater than he first imagined. He now seeks merely to weary out the English in the present year. But in the next year, or in 1813, he will send an expedition of 40,000 men from the Scheldt, as if to menace Ireland; and, having thrown us off our guard, he will divide that force into four parts for the recovery of the French and Dutch colonies in the West Indies. He counts also on having a part of his army in Spain free for service elsewhere: it must be sent to seize Sicily or Egypt.
But this was not all. His thoughts also turn to the Cape of Good Hope. Eight thousand men are to sail from Brest to seize that point of vantage at which he had[pg.230] gazed so longingly in 1803. Of these plans, the recovery of Egypt evidently lay nearest to his heart. He orders the storage at Toulon of everything needful for an Egyptian expedition, along with sixty gun-vessels of light draught suitable for the navigation of the Nile or of the lakes near the coast.[[242]] Decrès is charged to send models of these craft; and we may picture the eager scrutiny which they received. For the Orient was still the pole to which Napoleon's whole being responded. Turned away perforce by wars with Austria, Russia, Prussia, and Spain, it swung round towards Egypt and India on the first chance of European peace, only to be driven back by some untoward shock nearer home. In 1803 he counted on the speedy opening of a campaign on the Ganges. In 1811 he proposes that the tricolour shall once more wave on the citadel of Cairo, and threaten India from the shores of the Red Sea. But a higher will than his disposed of these events, and ordained that he should then be flung back from Russia and fight for his Empire in the plains of Saxony.[pg.231]